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Rusks, Sweet
Take a stale savoy cake, lemon cake, or pound cake, cut it into slices, and divide these into pieces about two inches square. Place these on a baking-tin, and put them into a cool oven to dry. When they are crisp and brown they are done enough. Store in a tin box in a dry place.
This is a use-up-the-cake recipe rather than a formula: the whole method is slow drying, and the only real variable is oven temperature.
- "Cool oven"Probably somewhere in the region of 250-300F. The aim is slow drying rather than baking, though the recipe itself expects some colour: it calls the pieces done when they are "crisp and brown".
- Savoy cakeA Victorian egg-rich sponge, generally baked in a tall decorated mould and made with little or no butter, in the family of the French biscuit de Savoie. Any plain sponge, madeira or pound cake stands in; avoid anything iced, filled or heavily fruited.
- Why stale is specifiedA day- or two-old cake has already lost surface moisture and cuts cleanly into squares. Fresh cake tears on the knife and takes considerably longer to dry through.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. At drying heat it may take an hour or more depending on thickness. Turn the pieces once, and judge by snapping one: it should break with no give at the centre.
- Cut thicknessThe recipe specifies two-inch squares but not how thick to slice; around half an inch dries evenly enough, while thicker pieces risk looking done outside while staying soft in the middle, which tells against them in storage.
- StorageThe tin box matters. Any residual softness will make them go leathery, so cool them completely on a rack before they go in, and keep them away from steam. Well dried, they keep for weeks.
- ServingSweet rusks of this kind were commonly eaten with tea, coffee or wine, and dry biscuits were often preferred to fresh cake in invalid and nursery cookery; the recipe itself says nothing about how to serve them.
Rusk originally meant bread twice-baked -- the same idea as biscuit (bis cuit, "twice cooked") and Italian biscotti -- and the technique long predates any sweet version: drying bread was how bakers and ships' victuallers made a loaf keep. The savoy cake named here was a fixture of nineteenth-century English baking, a tall moulded egg sponge well suited to this second baking. Similar drying methods survive commercially in the hard sweet rusks still sold for tea and for teething children.